Then and That
by Shiroi Iyasu
Summary: And he concluded, eventually, that a fake is still a fake regardless. -sentences drabble-


Ah, summer break, I missed you.

I honestly do not know why I wrote this. You are all free to drop a guess or two. But if I do know something, it's that I am personally very torn between either loving or blaming the mod for the Fake!Garry RP Tumblr.

*(And after some serious debating right after posting this originally, I think the _askaloneib_ Tumblr also needs some gratitude/praise/heck-simply-attention-just-because, since I first came upon Fake!Garry through that blog, which in itself was a total coincidence. Heck, all the Ib blogs I'm following, I had found out or basically stumbled upon by complete accident.)

Enjoy(?).

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_You and the rose are unified-_

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He wanders the world. Blood and paint, smiles and malice. He describes it as such, because he can only think of eloquent poetry that he himself twists and cracks.

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_Too fragile_, he thinks as he crushes the vivid moth in his hand, and blankly watches it die and wither into pencil shavings before it can even hit the ground.

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He finds himself in a room much too big for anyone, and looks over a pathetic pile of soot and charred paper - for an undefined moment in time, he discovers his sympathy for the dead, and a thought of a surreal funeral.

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Sometimes, he thinks he's seeing things - the reality of this world says otherwise.

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He's not immune to sleep - he climbs up the childish scrawl that he's supposed to identify as a tree among a small grove of fruit trees, and rests on a branch where he searches his endless dreams.

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Certain things make him remember things that aren't his - an abandoned candy wrapper, a rose-shade of red, a milk puzzle, and he imagines a helpless child trapped in his grasp.

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One time, he finds a fake rose, painted strongly the color of impossibility. He does nothing but let it become a dart on the wall, like a reminder and a ward all the same.

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If there's one thing that he dislikes of his own will, it's the color blue.

_..._

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_Just like her_, the ladies will mutter softly as if towards him in secret, _just like her - another queen of the imaginary land._

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The nightmare world has quieted itself with the death of its innocent resident - doesn't stop them from chasing him around sometimes, and it doesn't stop him from wondering how much he's acting like the girl of ashes.

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There are times when he violently plunges a palette knife into a painting's arm, and there are times he throws himself into the crayon lake to no avail.

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_-when your rose begins to rot, so too will you rot away-_

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He knows by now that time must have passed on without _him_ - in a room, the painting of two parents has vanished entirely.

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From a rare moment where he is friendly with the residents of the Fabricated World, he learns of a wistful routine of looking out the painting windows - he's not surprised that he's been adopting that habit for a while already.

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When he rests, he may dream of nothing, may dream of innocent things, or will dream of not so innocent things...

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A blue doll visits him - it talks to him about a loveless little princess who unconsciously ruled this twisted world with her own thoughts and beliefs, and how he's a bit like her.

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He loves her - loves her so, _so_ deeply - and he can only do so much wishing before his dreams bleed far too deep, until crimson is more than just his favorite color.

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The concept of life and death is as strange as true happiness and miracles for him, and he does not have the choice to enjoy any of them either.

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He doesn't hate the girl - green with envy, indeed she was painted almost ironically to be, but he understands and he's innocently satisfied that he knows something that_ he_ never managed to achieve at the very end.

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From the depths of his memories, roses and exchanges lead to utter despair.

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It is here, in this empty world where time stands still, that he is reborn and dead and born.

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There is one memory of his own that he will never re-visit - of a mirrored corpse and a furious question that will never be answered till the end of eternity.

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And thus, Garry continues to travel the illusionary realm - lonely and bittersweet, as how the sleeping man appears to an evening rose-keeper.

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_Know the weight of your own life..._

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Hope you're happy, Miss Moddies, you got a new shipper for Fake!Garry x Ib.

Some of my personal headcanon points of this fic I should probably note -

1) This fic follows the Forgotten Portrait ending.

2) I imagine that Mary can actually alter the reality of the painting world to an extent, since she is somehow more sentient or some reason that even I don't know about. But she never realises that 'power' of hers.

3) Following the above headcanon of mine, Garry eventually takes her place. This causes a few changes in the Fabricated World, but I left that open for the readers to come to their own conclusions.

4) 'Painting windows' mostly just refers to any painting in a Guertena art exhibition that can be used to see the real world. In some other drabble of mine, Mary had a habit of looking out through them.

Reviews are loved and flames are not.

~Shiroi


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